It’s pretty funny how I actually find these posts pretty entertaining to myself… going back and looking at all the desktop upgrades I’ve gone through over the years.

In any case I thought it was high past time to give Windows 10 a spin so I went out and purchased a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD. I did this so I could clone my 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD, providing me a very simple backout plan if I didn’t like Windows 10 or something went terribly wrong. I fired up Clonzilla Live via a USB flash drive and quickly cloned the 256GB SSD to the 512GB SSD. I installed the 512GB SSD and put the 256GB SSD in a safe pace. The computer booted up to Windows 7 fine on the new SSD and I upgraded to Windows 10 with no problems or issues. Fast forward almost four months later and I’m pretty happy with the upgrade. I’m not sure I gained a whole lot from a technical standpoint. Windows 7 had worked pretty well for me the past few years and I suspect Windows 10 will do the same but if the upgrade hadn’t been free I’m not sure I would have made the jump myself. About four weeks ago I upgraded my Lenovo T430 to Windows 10 without issue. It helps that I replaced the hard drive with an SSD about a year ago.

Windows 10 is a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users until July 29, 2016 so time is running short.

I’m a Windows guy and I’m happy to admit it. I grew up with Windows, yes I ran Windows 3.0, and I have supported Windows desktops throughout my entire career. I decided sometime ago that while Apple has some great products I just wasn’t really interested in learning a new operating system and decided to stick with Windows and yes Linux specifically Ubuntu (desktop) and CentOS (server).

This week right in the middle of a fiber cut that left me with multiple Internet and Metro Ethernet circuits down the Seagate Momentus Thin hard drive in my Lenovo T430 ThinkPad up and died on me. Like a typical user I had left notes and documents on the C: drive that I hadn’t copied to either SharePoint, OneDrive or my team’s network share. A scramble ensued and I was ultimately able to recover the few files that I desperately wanted. One of those files included all my notes on building GSLB VIPs across a pair of A10 vThunder appliances – look for that post soon. I can still recall my younger days and the excitement that would ensue around rebuilding my desktop or laptop. Windows would generally slow down over time due to application and registry glut so a rebuild would usually result in a much better performing machine. I’m definitely not young anymore nor do I have the time, or patience, to be rebuilding my laptop or desktop.

The desktop team quickly replaced my hard drive but I took a minute and thought, “this is a great time to upgrade to a SSD“. I don’t run the corporate desktop image, instead I dual boot between Windows 8.1 (custom install) and Ubuntu 14, so while the desktop team had quickly replaced my failed hard drive I now needed to rebuild my entire machine along with all my applications, configurations, license keys, etc. If I’m going to spend all this time and effort I need to get something out of it – so I upgraded to an Intel 730 Series 240GB SSD. The Lenovo T430 ThinkPad only allows for 7mm think drives so you need to be mindful of that small detail when selecting a SSD that will physically fit into the laptop. I went ahead and started rebuilding the laptop using the Seagate hard drive – I couldn’t really wait even for the day it took NewEgg to ship the SSD to my house from New Jersey. When the Intel 730 arrived I performed a System Image Backup of Windows 8.1 to an external hard disk, installed the SSD, booted from a Windows 8.1 USB recovery stick and restored the backup to the SSD. The laptop booted the first time without issue, I installed the Intel SSD utilities to optimize the configuration (enable TRIM, etc) and the upgrade was complete. While the Lenovo T430 ThinkPad is no power house it gets the job done for me.

I’ve been slowly exploring Microsoft OneDrive and OneNote. Until a few years ago I would continually leave all sorts of paper notes all over my desk, eventually I migrated to just using Notepad which resulted in me leaving text documents all over my desktop or home drive. Very difficult to organize, somewhat difficult to search. I just started using Microsoft’s OneNote using OneDrive to store the documents. Hopefully this will help me organize my notes better and ultimately make me more efficient.

A few weeks ago I was asked by mom to pick-out a new computer for dad. I briefly shopped around trying to determine if I would purchase a desktop from the likes of Dell, Acer, Asus, etc or if I would build him a custom desktop by ordering the individual parts. I eventually decided to build a custom desktop and I thought it might also afford me the opportunity to teach my daughters about the different components that make up a desktop computer. Well unfortunately, I didn’t get many takers when I asked for help assembling the build – there was a surprise!

The POWER SW and RESET SW leads on the Antec Sonata III 500 were reversed. I spent about 2 hours cannibalizing another desktop trying to eliminate the various components before I stumbled upon a review on NewEgg that claimed the wires were mis-labled. Amazingly enough the original poster was correct – the wires were mis-labeled! Swapping them immediately resolved my problem and the machine came to life.

I love challenges but really Antec… shame on you. This build went from a happy fun experience to a frustrating mess… I spent wasted so much time troubleshooting the problem assuming it was a component issue. And even after I stumbled upon the solution I then had to go back and reassemble both desktops.

It’s been a while since I upgraded my primary desktop machine so I thought it was time to spend a little coin. While I did install a SSD back in August 2012 I thought it was time for a completely new machine. When I get a new machine I usually pass my old one down to the wife and then her old machine to the kids and so on this way everyone has a little something to be excited about. This time around I decided to splurge and go for what I would probably consider a fairly high-end build. I also ordered a new case and power supply so I could have both machines running at the same time and could take my time migrating the data and content from the old machine to the new machine.

I thought about going with water cooling but eventually decided to stick with air cooling and purchased the Zalman CNPS9900ALED .The Zalman heatsink is insanely huge, words just don’t do it justice. While the Antec P280 case is fairly large itself, the Zalman heatsink quickly fills the case making it look small. Thankfully everything arrived within a few days of ordering it and it took me about 2 days to assemble the new machine. I performed the assembly in the following order;

The hardest part was figuring out how to mount the Zalman CPU heatsink which probably took about 20-35 minutes. Thankfully everything was working right out of the box and I had no DoAs or RMAs to contend with. Obviously I stayed with Windows 7 64-bit having heard all about the issues with Windows 8.

It was that time again for yet another upgrade to the old home desktop.

There’s been quite a few desktop upgrades in the time I’ve been blogging. The first was back in October of 2007, then again in December 2007 I added some accessories, in January 2008 I had a hard disk die, in December of 2008 I replaced the motherboard and CPU, in July 2010 I upgraded to Windows 7 64bit leaving Windows Vista behind, and most recently in October 2011 I upgraded my video card and replaced a dying power supply.

While I was potentially looking at building an entirely new desktop (Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz) I decided to hold off for now and instead take the leap into SSDs, replacing my trusty Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM with a SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC128D/AM 2.5″ 128GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD.

The choir of migrating the data was pretty painless although it did take quite sometime to run through the backups (you always make backups just in case) and then copy the partitions using Norton Ghost. When all the bits were done moving around I just unplugged the Raptor and plugged in the Samsung. Windows 7 booted right up and announced it had discovered new hardware and asked me to reboot. That was it… my desktop went from taking about 100-120 seconds to boot to taking about 30 seconds to boot.

I’ll give credit to NewEgg once again… they shipped in one day from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.